About

D.E. Wittkower is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, where he teaches on philosophy of technology, on philosophy of social media, and on information literacy and digital culture. In addition to being editor or author of six books on philosophy for a general audience, he is author or coauthor of forty-two book chapters and journal articles, in publications including First Monday, Techné, International Review of Information Ethics, The APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, and Social Identities. He has also written for Slate, Speakeasy, and Passcode, and has recorded a dozen audiobooks that, combined, have been accessed over a million times.

His research focuses on and branches out from the intersection of phenomenology of technology and feminist ethics of care. He has published work on topics including self and self-performance on Facebook, friendship online, the function and value of boredom on SNS, the role of the cute in digital culture, the phenomenology of audiobooks, the Occupy movement, ethics of care and employee loyalty, disempowerment and exploitation in crowdfunding, the crisis in copyright, technological influences in the construction of white male normativity, Philip K. Dick, and the iPod. Works currently in progress concern an ethics of gamification, the strange prominence of bacon in online culture, a phenomenology of sharing content in social media, and foundational work on Internet Cat Theory.

He received a Ph.D in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2006, where his training concentrated on German philosophy and the history of value theory (ethics, aesthetics, social/political philosophy), but also included training in Pragmatist and Analytic philosophical traditions. He is Phi Beta Kappa (1997), and was given the 2011 Award for Distinguished Teaching by the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (Coastal Carolina University).